Abstract
This study is concerned with the nature of the coverage in introductory social psychology textbooks of the Stanford prison experiment (SPE), given the many criticisms, especially recently, of the SPE. These criticisms concern both the study’s methodology and the situationist explanation of the outcome. Ten textbooks were analyzed for coverage of the SPE and its ensuing criticisms. Coverage of the SPE was found to be slightly less than that in introductory psychology textbooks, and the majority of the texts providing coverage either provided no or minimal coverage of the criticisms. Contributing factors to and possible explanations for such coverage are discussed. One explanation is applied to textbook coverage of the Kitty Genovese story and a critique exposing its inaccuracies.
The Stanford prison experiment (SPE; Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973a, 1973b; Zimbardo, 2007) is one of the most famous experiments, and arguably the most famous experiment, in the history of psychology (Gregoire, 2013). However, since the SPE was conducted in 1971, there have been numerous criticisms of both the study’s methodology and the researchers’ situationist explanation of its outcome. Because Griggs (2014) has recently provided a detailed account of these criticisms in this journal and this study is a direct continuation of the Griggs study, we will only briefly highlight the evidence for the most damning criticism of the SPE, the presence of strong demand characteristics, and then provide a summary listing of the other major criticisms before describing the purpose of this study.
Not long after the SPE had been conducted, Banuazizi and Movahedi (1975) provided data that indicated that the SPE was likely confounded by strong demand characteristics. Banuazizi and Movahedi solicited student responses to a questionnaire that included a brief description of the procedures followed in the SPE and some open-ended questions to determine the respondents’ awareness of the experimental hypothesis and their expectancies regarding the outcomes of the experiment. The vast majority of the 150 students responding determined the experiment’s hypothesis (80%) and predicted that the behavior of the guards would be oppressive (80.9%). Thus, it seems that most of the participants in the SPE would also have guessed how they were supposed to behave in the experiment. However, the participants, especially those who were assigned to be guards, did not have to guess. Subsequent revelations by Zimbardo himself about his active leadership in the SPE (Zimbardo, 2007) disclosed that these participants were largely told how they were supposed to behave (Banyard, 2007; Gray, 2013; Haslam & Reicher, 2003). This is because in his role as prison superintendent, Zimbardo (2007) gave the guards an orientation that seems to have provided clear guidance about how they should behave (p. 55). As Banyard (2007; see also Haslam & Reicher, 2003) pointed out, in his orientation, Zimbardo aligned himself with the guards by using the pronoun “we” and gave clear instructions for the hostile environment that “we” are going to create for “them” (the prisoners). For example, he said, “They will be able to do nothing and say nothing that we don’t permit” (p. 55). Thus, Zimbardo’s orientation served to legitimize oppression in the SPE.
In addition, when some of the guards became abusive toward the prisoners, Zimbardo, via his silence, provided tacit approval of the guards’ behavior, thereby confirming to these guards that they were behaving as they should. He also instructed his prison warden (one of his research assistants) to chastise the guards who were not behaving like these abusive guards and to make them more assertive (see Zimbardo, 2007, p. 65, for more details). Furthermore, Carlo Prescott, an ex-con who was the SPE’s chief consultant on real prisons (Zimbardo, 2007), claimed that he provided Zimbardo and his colleagues with information that enabled them to make the experiment more similar to real prison life (Prescott, 2005). In his 2005 letter in the Stanford Daily titled “The lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment” (available at http://valtinsblog.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/lie-of-the-stanford-prison-experiment.html), Prescott expressed great regret for his involvement in the SPE and disclosed that it was he who came up with the abusive and humiliating behaviors displayed by the guards (e.g., having prisoners use buckets in place of toilets). He also said that he thought that “Zimbardo began with a preformed blockbuster conclusion and designed an experiment to ‘prove’ that conclusion.”
Gray (2013; see Addendum, February 14, 2014) also reported some remarks by John Mark, one of the guards in the SPE, that mesh well with Prescott’s admissions about the SPE. Mark’s comments appeared in “The Menace Within,” in the July/August 2011 issue of the Stanford Alumni magazine (available at http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=40741). Mark said: I didn’t think it was ever meant to go the full 2 weeks. I think Zimbardo wanted to create a dramatic crescendo, and then end it as quickly as possible. I felt that throughout the experiment, he knew what he wanted and then tried to shape the experiment—by how it was constructed, and how it played out—to fit the conclusion that he had already worked out. He wanted to be able to say that college students, people from middle-class backgrounds—people [sic] will turn on each other just because they’re given a role and given power. Based on my experience, and what I saw and what I felt, I think that was a real stretch. I don’t think the actual events match up with the bold headline. I never did, and I haven’t changed my opinion.
That Zimbardo and his research associates’ guidance may have been critical to the SPE outcome is also supported by some findings of a study of simulated prison environments conducted in Australia by Lovibond, Mithiran, and Adams (1979). For example, in both a more liberal prison condition in which security was maintained in a manner that allowed prisoners to retain their self-respect and in a participatory condition in which prisoners were treated as individuals and included in the decision-making process, the behavior of the guards and prisoners was rather benign and very dissimilar from the dramatic behavioral outcomes observed in the SPE. In addition, in 2002, social psychologists Alexander Haslam and Stephen Reicher, in collaboration with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), conducted a prison study (known as the BBC Prison Study) that followed the same basic paradigm as the SPE but had a very different outcome. For our purposes, it is only important to know that, unlike Zimbardo, Haslam and Reicher did not instruct their guards to subjugate the prisoners to their will in the way that Zimbardo did and that the guards’ and prisoners’ behavior diverged markedly from that in the SPE, thereby bolstering the argument that demand characteristics (and Zimbardo’s leadership) were responsible for the outcome of the SPE. More information about the BBC Prison Study and its results can be found in Haslam and Reicher (2005, 2012) and Reicher and Haslam (2006) and at the study’s Web site, www.bbcprisonstudy.org.
In addition to the presence of strong demand characteristics, the SPE has been criticized for the lack of generalizability and ecological validity (e.g., Banuazizi & Movahedi, 1975; Fromm, 1973), the possibility of participant selection bias (Carnahan & McFarland, 2007; McFarland & Carnahan, 2009), for breaching research ethics (e.g., Savin, 1973), for providing no satisfactory account of the individual differences observed (e.g., McGreal, 2013), and for being a pseudoscientific experiment that is more aptly described as Kafkaesque absurdist performance (Ribkoff, 2013).
This extensive body of criticism creates doubt about the accuracy of the coverage of the SPE in psychology textbooks. According to Morawski (1992), textbooks are the key transmitters of psychological knowledge both to potential new members of the discipline and to those outside of the discipline (giving psychology away), and therefore it is essential that textbook information be accurate. Thus, it is important to the psychological teaching community to identify inaccuracies in our textbooks, so that they can be corrected and we as textbook authors and teachers do not continue to “give away” false information about our discipline. Given that the SPE is one of the most famous studies in psychology with far-reaching impact outside of psychology, it is especially important that coverage of it in our textbooks be accurate. Hence, Griggs (2014) analyzed the accuracy of the coverage of the SPE and the criticisms of it in a sample of 13 current introductory psychology textbooks. He found that the coverage was inaccurate because of the very limited coverage of the criticisms of the SPE. For example, 5 of the 11 texts that discussed the SPE did not include any discussion of the criticisms of the SPE, and the other 6 included only very minimal coverage of them. He proposed some possible explanations for this limited coverage, principally: (a) text authors’ lack of awareness of the extent of the criticisms and (b) space constraints in introductory psychology textbooks.
Although these two explanations seem plausible for the inadequate coverage in introductory psychology textbooks, they would not be as applicable to introductory social psychology textbooks. Because introductory social psychology texts are exclusively on social psychology and written by social psychologists, lack of awareness of the extent of the criticisms should not be as problematic, and space issues would not be as constraining as they are in introductory psychology texts in which social psychology is typically covered in just one chapter (Griggs & Jackson, 2013). Thus, in this study, we examined a sample of contemporary introductory social psychology textbooks to check their coverage of the SPE and the criticisms of it. We hypothesized that on average, these texts would provide lengthier and more balanced coverage of the SPE and the criticisms of it. If this hypothesis is supported, then the extent and nature of the coverage will be of interest; if it is not supported, the reasons for the lack of more adequate coverage than in introductory psychology textbooks will be of interest.
Method
We used the most recent editions of 10 introductory social psychology textbooks as the text sample. We include complete reference information for all of these texts in the References section, and each reference is denoted by an asterisk. These 10 texts comprise almost the population of introductory social psychology textbooks if briefer versions of two of these texts and texts authored by sociologists are excluded. 1
The methodology was similar to that used in Griggs (2014). To determine whether coverage of the SPE was included in a text, the Name Index was checked for Zimbardo and the Subject Index was checked for Stanford prison experiment or any possible variants, such as prison study. If coverage was identified, the location of the coverage was recorded and the extent of the coverage was measured in terms of the number of paragraphs devoted to it. The extent of coverage of SPE criticisms was also measured by the number of paragraphs devoted to them. This measure of length (number of paragraphs) was used primarily because the actual amount of text on a page varies greatly among texts. This variance is caused by the number of columns of text, how extensive the art program is, the font size employed, and so on. In addition, this length measure allowed us to compare our coverage findings to those of Griggs (2014) for introductory psychology textbooks. The number of photographs of the SPE and their content was also recorded for each text, and whether or not the SPE was related to the Iraqi prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib was noted.
As in Griggs (2014), the nature of the coverage of the SPE was determined by the chapter topic and subsection heading of the location in the text. If coverage was spread across multiple chapters, chapter topics and subsection heading information were noted for all of the locations. The completeness of coverage was determined by identifying what other SPE-related studies or critiques were cited and how much space was devoted to coverage of the critiques. The cited references were recorded for the purpose of determining which SPE references were cited most often and whether references for SPE critiques and the BBC Prison Study were included.
Results
First, 3 (30%) of the 10 texts did not include any discussion of the SPE. It should be noted that one of these texts included the citation of Haney and Zimbardo (2009) in a sentence in a paragraph on the fundamental attribution error that claimed that this error often resulted in a gross underestimation of the inherent power of the situation. We decided that this one sentence, comprising at best a tangential reference to the SPE, did not constitute coverage of the SPE. Coverage in the other seven textbooks varied from 1 to 6 paragraphs, with mean and median coverage of 3.0 and 2.0 paragraphs, respectively. Mean and median coverage for the entire sample of 10 textbooks were 2.1 and 1.5 paragraphs, respectively, with a range of 0–6.
To put these coverage statistics into perspective, we will compare them to the comparable statistics observed by Griggs (2014) for a set of 13 contemporary introductory psychology textbooks. Griggs found that 2 (15%) of the 13 texts did not include any discussion of the SPE and that SPE coverage in the other 11 textbooks varied from 1 to 7 paragraphs, with mean and median coverage of 3.6 and 4.0 paragraphs, respectively. Mean and median coverage for the entire sample of 13 textbooks were 3.1 and 3.0 paragraphs, respectively, with a range of 0 to 7 paragraphs. Thus, contrary to our hypothesis, the typical SPE coverage in introductory social psychology textbooks was slightly less (but not significantly so, p = .15, t-test) than that observed in introductory psychology textbooks.
In the seven introductory social psychology textbooks that included SPE coverage, this coverage appeared in six different content chapters—twice in an opening chapter on the nature of social psychology and once each in chapters on research methods, group processes, social influence, behavior and attitudes, and the law, respectively. The coverage in the two opening chapters mainly involved using the SPE as an example of social psychology research explaining behavior, especially the power of the situation, and the coverage in the research methods chapter centered on ethical issues in social psychology research. The coverage in the other four chapters revolved around social roles in two texts and conformity and real prison experience in the other two. The text that included SPE coverage in the law chapter (under the subtopic of real prison experience) also included very brief SPE discussions in a section on ethics in research in a chapter on doing social psychology research and a section on roles in a chapter on group processes.
Three of the seven texts providing SPE coverage did not include any coverage of the SPE criticisms. Of the four that did, two provided rather minimal coverage in one paragraph. One discussed only the ethical issues associated with the SPE and the other discussed the individual differences present in situations such as the SPE and very briefly, alluded to the possibility of participant self-selection in the SPE. The other two texts provided more nuanced, lengthier coverage of the SPE criticisms. One text focused mainly on the BBC Prison Study and the implications of its findings with respect to the SPE results, leading to a discussion of social norms and how they arise. The other text very briefly alluded to two SPE criticisms, then discussed the BBC Prison Study and its findings, and ended with a discussion of the possible participant self-selection criticism proposed by Carnahan and McFarland (2007). Neither of these two texts explicitly mentioned the strong demand characteristics present in the SPE, but one did cite the Banuazizi and Movahedi (1975) reference as a sample methodological criticism. In sum, only two of the seven texts including coverage of the SPE approached providing the type of coverage predicted by our hypothesis.
The mean and median numbers of SPE citations per text were 2.3 and 2.0, respectively, with a range of 1–5. The specific SPE references cited varied considerably across the seven texts. There were seven different references cited and a total of 16 citations provided for the SPE. Two of these seven references were cited only once, two twice, and two 3 times. One (Haney et al., 1973b) was cited 4 times. This citation variance is likely at least partially due to the shotgun publication approach used to initially report the SPE results in the early 1970s. With respect to citations to SPE criticisms, Banuazizi and Movahedi (1975), Carnahan and McFarland (2007), McFarland and Carnahan (2009), Savin (1973), and Turner (2006) were all cited once. Citations for the BBC Prison Study included three (twice in one text) to Reicher and Haslam (2006) and one each to Haslam and Reicher (2007) and Haslam and Reicher (2012).
Providing evidence of the SPE’s compelling iconography, five of the seven texts providing SPE coverage included at least one photo from the SPE. The mean and median numbers of photos were 1.1 and 1.0, respectively, with a range of 1–4. All of the photos were of the guards or prisoners or both. In addition, six of the seven textbooks discussed the Iraqi prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and related it to the SPE.
Discussion
Our hypothesis that introductory social psychology textbooks would provide lengthier, more balanced coverage of the SPE and its criticisms than that found in introductory psychology textbooks was not supported. The current findings indicated that introductory social psychology textbooks do not devote much space to coverage of the SPE and even less to its criticisms. Thirty percent did not even include coverage of the SPE, and the remainder only devoted an average of three paragraphs to it, slightly less than the coverage in introductory psychology textbooks. Coverage of the SPE criticisms was also rather scarce in most of the textbooks. Of the seven texts that provided coverage of the SPE, three provided no coverage of the criticisms, two provided rather minimal critical discussions, and two provided coverage that approached the predicted lengthier, more balanced coverage of the SPE and its criticisms.
First, we will consider the question of why, given the abundance of SPE criticism available, would most introductory social psychology text authors provide such limited coverage of it? Two possibilities are (a) lack of space for inclusion and (b) lack of knowledge of the criticism. Lack of sufficient space for inclusion would not seem very likely, given that such coverage would only entail a few paragraphs of text. Two of the texts in the present study demonstrated that such coverage was clearly doable. Lack of knowledge of the criticism also does not seem very likely, given the sheer amount of criticism that has been published and the prominence of the journals in which it has appeared. Nevertheless, it may be the case that the some text authors are not aware of the extent of the criticism, and if they were, they would likely revise their coverage of the SPE or possibly even omit it. If this is the case and the text authors are not aware of the entirety of the criticism of the SPE, then this article should help to rectify that situation.
Another possibility for the lack of coverage of the SPE criticisms stems from the pressure on text authors to be up to date and include coverage of important new studies and topics but keep the text length about the same (Blumenthal, 1990–1991). In order to accommodate these conflicting demands, expansions of coverage for all of the existing topics required by new developments for those topics obviously cannot make it into the new edition. Sometimes older classic studies are even deleted from texts (Griggs & Jackson, 2007). But, given the notoriety of the SPE, it would seem too important to delete or not to update its coverage. However, 3 of the 10 textbooks examined did not even include coverage of the SPE. This lack of any coverage could be due to the age of the SPE, but it could also be due to the authors’ decision not to include coverage because the extensive criticism of the SPE has successfully negated its findings (e.g., see Gray, 2013, who details why he has never included SPE coverage in his introductory psychology textbook).
Another factor that may have partially contributed to the brief coverage of the SPE and the lack of coverage of the SPE criticisms is the authors’ desire to link the SPE to the recent Iraqi prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, thereby demonstrating the relevance of social psychology research to real-world behavior. Such authors would need to provide at least minimal coverage of the SPE in order to develop the link to Abu Ghraib in their text. In support of this possibility, six of the seven texts that provided coverage of the SPE linked the SPE results to prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Interestingly, the seventh text linked the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse to Milgram’s obedience experiments (Milgram, 1974) instead of the SPE.
One other possible reason for the lack of sufficient coverage of the SPE criticisms is what we term the “story line” explanation. Without inclusion of any criticism that would muddle the story line, the SPE “story” can be told in two or three paragraphs and provides a compelling tale of the power of social roles and the situation, likely leading students to grasp this singular point. As McConnell (1988) pointed out in his article on textbook writing, “If you want to capture the imaginations of young people, you have to tell them stories!” (p. 160). But what happens if the story line is muddled by infusing the various SPE criticisms into the story? Simplicity becomes complexity, likely resulting in student confusion and disengagement (Harris, 1979). This explanation is also consistent with the transportation theory of narrative impact on persuasion (Green & Brock, 2000, 2002). According to this theory, a story impacts persuasion via the reader being transported into the world of the narrative (being engrossed in the story) and hence, cognitively and affectively impacted by the narrative. It certainly seems likely that the SPE narrative sans criticisms would lead to such “transportation.”
This story line explanation could reasonably apply to the two texts that positioned SPE coverage in the opening chapter on the nature of social psychology and another that positioned coverage in its discussion of social roles. None of these texts included any discussion of SPE criticism to complicate the SPE story line. The story line explanation can also be applied to one of the two texts that provided rather minimal discussion of the SPE criticisms. This text positioned the SPE coverage in the research methods chapter and only briefly mentioned the ethical issues created by the experiment, thereby not muddling the SPE story line. The obvious downside of such coverage is that students will be misled into accepting the story as fact, and sadly, it seems that students seldom question the textbook stories that they are told (Burton, 2001). Thus, it becomes critical for social psychology teachers who are using textbooks lacking sufficient coverage of the SPE criticisms to provide such coverage in their lectures. Coverage of these methodological criticisms will also serve to reinforce students’ knowledge of research methods and their importance in psychological research.
To pursue this explanation further, we will consider another story developed by Gansberg (1964) and Rosenthal (1964) that is included in almost all, if not all, introductory social psychology textbooks—the story of the 38 witnesses who watched the attack but remained inactive during the brutal murder of Kitty Genovese. Providing coverage of both this story and the recent evidence-based criticisms of the accuracy of the story by Manning, Levine, and Collins (2007) poses a problem for textbook authors akin to that of providing coverage of the SPE story and its subsequent criticisms. 2 Similar to the SPE story, the story of the 38 witnesses is compelling and can be told in a few paragraphs. However, just as coverage of the SPE criticisms would muck up the SPE story line, the Manning et al. criticisms would do so for the Kitty Genovese story. For example, there were likely only 3 to 6 witnesses, not 38; there were only two attacks, not three; there is clear evidence of intervention disrupting the first attack, even calls to the police; and given the location of the second and fatal attack, it was impossible for all but one of the known witnesses to observe it. The Kitty Genovese story is a good test of the story line explanation because according to Manning et al., it is resistant to change because it has come to function as a kind of modern parable—the antonym of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Hence, to examine further the plausibility of the story line explanation for the lack of coverage of SPE criticisms that we observed, we analyzed the coverage of the Kitty Genovese story in our sample of 10 introductory social psychology textbooks.
All 10 textbooks provided coverage of the Kitty Genovese story, on average in three paragraphs. This finding is consistent with Manning et al.’s (2007) finding that the typical Kitty Genovese story was present in all of the 10 introductory social psychology texts (copyright dates ranging from 1995 to 2005) that they examined. In support of the story line explanation, five (50%) of the texts examined in this study did not cite Manning et al., and three of the five that cited it did so in a rather perfunctory manner in one sentence, somewhat defusing its importance (e.g., “Although some of the facts have been disputed,…”). In one of these texts, essentially the same sentence citing Manning et al. appeared in two different chapters (methodology and prosocial behavior). One of the two remaining texts provided a paragraph describing Manning et al.’s criticisms but separated the Kitty Genovese story and the Manning et al. coverage with about five pages of text, thereby lessening its impact on the Genovese story line. Although three of these four texts did not provide much coverage of the corrections, it is important to note that they did provide qualification of the story. The fifth text did describe the corrections and integrated them within its coverage of the Genovese story. In sum, coverage of the Kitty Genovese story is consistent with the story line explanation in that half of the texts did not even cite the Manning et al. critique and some of those that did, did so in a somewhat defusing manner. These findings for coverage of the Kitty Genovese story thus provide support, albeit indirect, for the story line explanation as a contributing factor to the lack of satisfactory coverage of the SPE criticisms observed in this study.
Given the story line explanation’s plausibility as a contributing factor to the lack of coverage of SPE criticisms and the Manning et al. (2007) study, the coverage of Milgram’s obedience experiments (which provide another compelling story line for textbook authors) in future editions of introductory social psychology textbooks should prove interesting because recently the methodology of these experiments has received substantial criticism (Gibson, 2013; Nicholson, 2011; Perry, 2013). For our purposes here, we will only briefly describe some of Perry’s criticisms.
After spending months locating and interviewing some of the participants in the Milgram experiments, relatives of the men who served as experimenter and learners in the experiments, and Milgram’s former students in addition to poring over the articles, notebooks, and recordings in the Milgram archives, Perry (2013) discovered some serious methodological problems in the obedience experiments. It seems that Milgram deliberately misrepresented his postexperimental debriefing procedures in his published work (see also Nicholson, 2011). Perry found that most of the participants at the end of the experiment were not completely debriefed and not told that the shock machine was a fake, that the learner was an actor, and that the learner was not actually shocked. It turns out that it was almost a year before these people received a complete explanation. In addition, the man posing as the experimenter did not stick to the experimental protocol and only use the four specified prods in the script and then stop the experiment after these prods had been exhausted. At various times, he strayed from the script and didn’t stop at four prods but invented more coercive prods and continued on. For example, in one experimental condition, he insisted that a woman participant continue 26 times. In addition, the extent and nature of the experimenter’s deviation from protocol varied across experimental conditions. Even the infamous “65% obedience rate” is brought into question by the strong possibility of participant expectations. For example, Perry argues that only about half of the participants in the experiments fully believed that the learner was being shocked, and about two thirds of these participants disobeyed the experimenter.
Given Perry’s criticisms (and those of Gibson, 2013, and Nicholson, 2011), it will be interesting to see how introductory social psychology textbook authors present the Milgram obedience “story” in the next editions of their textbooks. Will these criticisms be ignored as many text authors have ignored the SPE criticisms and Manning et al.’s (2007) criticism of the accuracy of the Kitty Genovese story? We would hope not, but the present results indicate that this is a strong possibility.
It is likely that all of the factors that we have discussed as well as others that we are not aware of played a role in the textbook authors’ decisions about the extent and nature of SPE coverage to be included in their texts. Making such decisions is not an easy task so it is important to realize that authoring a textbook is a very complex, challenging, and arduous task. McConnell’s (1988) discussion of this task for introductory psychology authors explicates the problems facing textbook authors. He pointed out that textbook authors have to satisfy five different audiences—students, instructors, peers and colleagues, publishers, and one’s inner feelings and needs—that make different and sometimes conflicting demands on the textbook author. As McConnell concluded: “Satisfying them all is something of an impossibility” (p. 167).
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
